How to Prepare Your Facebook Profile for Graph Search

Facebook 's “Graph Search” is slowly rolling out to more Facebook users, giving them the ability to search deeper through Facebook content.

What this does mean, though, is that all those photos you might have hidden on your Facebook Timeline will be easily searchable through Graph Search with a few words: “photos of [your name here].”

First and foremost: Graph Search is locked to your privacy settings. That means if you have a photo only visible to your friends, or friends of friends, then only they will be able to find that photo through Graph Search.

Still, your photos might not have always been flagged as visible to “friends” only — and photos taken by friends of you might be accessible to the wider public. And you’ll want to double check that before everything becomes immediately accessible.

Facebook has a lot of ways to help lock down your privacy ahead of Graph Search being rolled out to all of Facebook’s users. Here are a few ways to get started:

Your Activity Log has a complete list of everything related to you and the apps you have connected to Facebook. (To get there, click on the Activity Log button located on the top right of your profile underneath your cover photo.) Here, you can find all of your posts and photos, including those that you were tagged in by friends. You can alter the visibility settings for each post and photo. This is your go-to place to ensure that your content is as private or as public as you want.

By clicking on photos within the Activity Log, you’ll be able to quickly surf through all the photos you are tagged in. Click on the little gray friends icon to the right of the photo to see the privacy settings and the option to remove the tag or report to Facebook that you want the photo removed. You can also click the check box on the left to report/remove in bulk.

You can also revert all of your previous posts to a selected privacy setting, such as “friends only.” This can’t be undone, but is a good way of ensuring everything you posted when Facebook was in its infancy remains private to only the people you want to see it. You can find this option in your privacy settings as “Limit the Audience for Past Posts.”

In some cases you might want your posts and photos to visible to a wider audience to make your profile more accessible in Graph Search — especially if you have a subscriber base and a following on Facebook.